Being There - All the News That Fits

Around-the-Clock at De Lauer's Super News Stand

By Matt Dibble

Charlie De Lauer, who will turn 90 in January, gets up at 4 a.m. most mornings and heads in to work. His workplace, De Lauer’s Super News Stand at 1310 Broadway, will already be in full swing, because it never closes. In fact, the front doors have only been shut a few times since moving to the current location in 1962, and no one knows if the doors even budge at this point.

The Super News Stand is a place where one can find the news of the world, in local form. If you are from Lagos, Nigeria; Fairbanks, Alaska; or Beirut, Lebanon, your hometown paper is here somewhere among more than 220 others. With more than 6,000 magazine titles, paperbacks, racing forms, snacks and drugstore items, there is a lot to keep track of, which is why Charlie shows up early. Most days he can be found jotting numbers in a massive ledger, perched high on the mezzanine level, a vantage point from which to view the world passing through his doors.

De Lauer’s is an Oakland institution, and 2007 will mark the newsstand’s hundredth year in operation. In 1907, 14-year-old Michael “Scotty” De Lauer, whose Italian immigrant family had settled in Cleveland, hopped a boxcar train in search of the fabled city of San Francisco. Oakland is where the train tracks ended—and where young Scotty landed squarely on his entrepreneurial feet. Perhaps homesick himself, he realized he could make money selling the newspapers that folks missed from their cities back east. The business was successful enough to lure his younger brother Charles (the father of Charlie) out the following year. Soon the brothers controlled street stands throughout the downtown area, waging a lively battle with competing outlets in an era when the daily paper was the only source of news. Scotty left the business to work for a San Francisco paper and to pursue a prizefighting career, and when Charles died at an early age, the reign of young Charlie, then 17, began. At that time, in 1937, the business had coalesced into two stands—one on 12th Street and one on Seventh Street—operating out of delivery wagons.

“When I first came in, I was all wound up and kept enlarging the stand,” says Charlie. “Eventually Bill Knowland, the owner of the [Oakland] Tribune, said ‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to move this indoors; it’s getting too big for the street.’ ” Though housed under a roof, the Super News Stand still feels like a continuation of the street, and the constant flow of feet has eroded deep grooves in the linoleum floor. Commuters looking for a news fix stop in all day long, and school kids hang out in the afternoon, reading comics and buying sodas. In the wee hours, fluorescent light and the latest Britney news lure drag queens, night-shift workers and sleepy cab drivers in from the dark. On a recent night around 2 a.m., a large man stumbled in and in a booming voice asked whether the store sold Eskimo Pies. (No.) A nervouslooking business traveler darted in to see if he could buy a toothbrush. (Yes.)

“It’s a microcosm of the world. All different ethnic groups, straight people, gay people, every color,” says Bud De Lauer, Charlie’s son and the store’s general manager. “Everyone comes in here, and they basically get along.”

“Every once in a while someone comes in here who is suffering some kind of severe depression or something. They know that there is a place they can go, browse around, talk to people. We make an effort to talk to them and reach out to them.”

Solomon Kidane wandered into De Lauer’s two years ago and decided he’d like to stay. He and his wife and two kids had just emigrated from Ethiopia. While searching for work, he’d stop by De Lauer’s to catch up on reading. Solomon, a high school biology teacher back home, discovered African newspapers, paperback classics and other useful texts like How To Win A Job. He eventually won a job at De Lauer’s and has been working six days a week and two double-shifts ever since. “You go in some stores and read the magazines and it’s not long before a security guy comes and says ‘Hey, guy, what are you doing?’ ” says Solomon, sitting on a stack of papers during lunch break. “But here it is not only the profit motive, that is the story.”

As the newspaper business continues its rapid decline, the De Lauer’s policy of open doors and open minds keeps the store afloat. Local newspapers are dwindling, but there is a boom in niche magazines, and the store carries virtually everything the distributors will deliver. There are nine different dog magazines, including Hollywood Dog and Gun Dog; a magazine for pen collectors (“The Past, Present and Future of Fine Writing Instruments”), and this month’s Rich Guy magazine (“Which Jets To Buy and Why”).

Settling in at his desk for lunch, Charlie is amused by one of their newest products, a plastic-wrapped sandwich bearing the image of a Porsche. “Each one of these has a different collectible car on it. I don’t know why anyone would want that, but we have it!” Maybe this attitude will keep De Lauer’s doors open for another hundred years.